quote:

---

I think we''re coming on a fundamental difference of philosophy here. Who should be able to set the tone of the game, and decide on the nature of the community? I have been acting on the decision that it is the designer who can and should do this. You, on the other hand, feel this role is to be taken by the players. I''m a control freak; you''re an anarchist (relatively speaking of course).

---

Agreed. I''m anarchistic in game design (and quasi-anarchistic in real life politics). I give you a game world and some basic game rules, you play the game. Not that I think games that don''t allow freedom are bad, but I just think that especially the MMO genre doesn''t benefit from constraints.

quote:

---

I''m not a big fan of the combat, and am not interested in bringing law to the masses by sword and fire - yes, I''m one of those fruity "role-players" who complain that there''s nothing to do but fight monsters, as if it were a bad thing. Hence my aversion to the rude and bloody minded.

---

Wait, wait. Combat is NOT a must. There will be ample ways for players to avoid confrontations with others. Simply bonding with others, forming large groups, will be an immediate deterrant to those who would bring harm upon you. As I really want to give the choice of how to play to the players, the ability to fight goes hand in hand with the ability to avoid fights.

quote:

---

I''m just guessing we''re not going to be able to see eye-to-eye on this one, unless you can figure out some way for my limp-wristed pansy elf harpist to survive in your nature red in tooth and claw...

---

Combat avoidance could take many forms. Finding groups to join, perhaps something simple as an invisibility spell to get you safely from A to B (but which could slow you down somewhat).

From original message:

quote:

---

Grief players are the most important issue facing massively multiplayer game designers today.

---

Current systems seem wholly inadequate of dealing with grief players while still allowing non-grief players some freedom (even in a design where they''re not meant to have too much freedom, you still want to give players choices), just like the current criminal law system in the US is wholly inadequate to deal with the reality of crime.
A complete overhaul is needed. Your system might work just as well as mine, but at least we agree that something new is required, right?

I got through about half the posts and had to put in my two cents. Excuse me plz if these were already mentioned. First I''ve seen the log idea done with regards to chat. It seemed to work pretty good. The game had a built in language filter that could be turned on and off, of course players would still find ways around that. But if they started harassing people or extreme spamming occured then any player could turn in their name and log for review. Also with regards to gamebanes and heros, I like the idea of admins being able to put rewards out on people who violate certain rules. If the game offers pvp as an option have the option set to "on" for as long as is needed. This would encourage self-policing.

If you let players semi-ban other players that''s what the grief player will specialise in!
They will go around and shun other people!

I think a distinction has to be made between people who like to play villains, and people who just play to spoil the fun for everyone else (myg0t, for example)

The former can be dealt with in-game. I''m not so sure about the latter, anything you introduce to deal with them is just as likely to be used against ordinary players.

Anyone who is causing trouble has a complain logged against him through an in game sheriff. The more complaints against that person, the larger the bounty on their head. Bounty Hunters can go to Sherriff''s office and get a job and go find the offending person and claim their head. Return with the player''s head, and a reward is recieved.

Who ever recieves the job of getting the offending player''s head is the only person allowed to go PvP with the offending player.

The final straw. If enough complaints have been logged against any particular player, their character now faces the threat of permanent, non-refundable death. All items will be dropped, and any other in-game resources are recycled. This goes for all characters that person plays to keep the player from muling stuff so they can tweak their other characters early on.

My two cents anyway.

While my reporting method would result in a lot of work for admins, you would not have to worry about grief players submitting false reports for long as a pattern of submitting false reports is a bannable offense.

Now, to offset the increased admin costs, lets make submitting a report cost the player $2 which is added to his monthly bill. There should be a cap on the number of reports a player can file in a day to avoid mommy andd daddy getting too upset when junior runs up $1000s in reporting costs.

Now, a game can be designed to limit what is or is not a reportable offense. Language filters and an ignore feature means there''s no reason to report verbal abuse as the player can deal with it directly.

In Everquest, I never ran into someone who was able to ruin my game experience (of course the spawn camping statagies that became core to gameplay did cause me to quit).

While I did end up /ignoring a lot of players, the satisfaction of hitting ignore more than made up for the verbal garbage I had to temporarily put up with. I didn''t have my PVP flag set, so no worries there.

As a final note, I present my ultimate solution to grief players: When signing up for the game, you must provide a real, verifiable real world address. The address is made public and is easily linked to your character. The possibly of real world consequences to online actions may clear up a lot of problems with grief players. Of course, we may be bringing a whole new meaning to the term "player killer".

To add to my idea above, when players want to log a complaint, they pay money or pay with items which goes into a pot to be paid out to the player or group of players that claim the person''s head. I say players because I like the idea of bounty hunter groups going after people. So, a group can take a job to kill a player instead of just one single player. I like the idea of being able to put up items and/or money against a person instead of only money. It would also be a good to notify the people who logged a complaint when the job has been taken, and when it is complete. That would be some good satisfaction right there.

quote:

---

Anyone who is causing trouble has a complain logged against him through an in game sheriff. The more complaints against that person, the larger the bounty on their head. Bounty Hunters can go to Sherriff''s office and get a job and go find the offending person and claim their head. Return with the player''s head, and a reward is recieved.

---

1000 grief players pick ''newbie 1'' and log a complain against him. Newbie gets bounty on their head.

quote:

---

Now, to offset the increased admin costs, lets make submitting a report cost the player $2 which is added to his monthly bill.

---

So now, not only does the game itself not know how to handle grief players, but I have to pay to start the process of an admin looking into the matter?

SANDMAN wrote:

quote:

---

I think a distinction has to be made between people who like to play villains, and people who just play to spoil the fun for everyone else (myg0t, for example)
The former can be dealt with in-game. I''m not so sure about the latter, anything you introduce to deal with them is just as likely to be used against ordinary players.

---

Exactly. Are you willing to deal with grief players by creating rules that will affect all players? Not only that, but the grief players will certainly know all about the rules, and will know how to avoid them. Innocent players might accidentally do something wrong and find themselves being given their first and last warning.

The only perfect system is to have no real system at all.

The idea of levying bounties might be a good way to go, but having it an official feature of gameplay might not be the best of ideas, like you said, Grief players rallying and buting bounties on newbie''s heads... But an interesting idea might be having just a bounty registration area. Everyone can put money or items under a bounty''s name. And whoever playerkills first gets the item and money. How to beat Grief players here is to realize grief players aren''t playing by the rules and thus aren''t reaping the rewards of the quests, so they probably couldn''t levy anything significant, while the greif players would have bounties placed on them by the players with more resources who are the focus of grief player''s torment.

Which brings up one more issue, how much of an advantage difference the characters have between them. Newbies start at level 1 assumebly, grief players probably find pathfinding bugs and gain a couple of levels, some skills, and then take out to abuse players, so, you may want to create a bit of a level groung by having a basic quest apply to all newbies (completely by themselves) and not allowing them into the world until they gain enough to survive the world. This has the side effect of preventing grief players from starting new characters and going out and reaking more havok.

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

/ignore in EQ did not really work. One guy wanted my spawn turn, so he kept opening a trade window with me when I went to attack. This cause me to die while I was trying to cancel the trade.

I think that was one of the last times I played. I did not really feel like submitting anything to an admin or hoping something gets done.

It is very unlikely 1000 grief players can pull together and shun the same person. Most MMOGs only have about 1-3K of people on a server at one time anyway.

Reallt horrible grief players would build there shun points up over a short period of time. This is why I also like the bounty idea. Having in-game complaints to an NPC sherrif who kept count would be interesting. It would be fun to look at the top 10 list and see how much they are worth.

Griefer could barely visit towns without getting killed. I can hear it now:
A) "Hey, I saw Bubu the other day!"
B) "Who?"
A) "Man, he is worth 10K now! No wait, it just went up to 11K, he must be online!"
B) "Lets got hunt for him! Posse(sp)!"

The next problem is a group of people may keep targeting a known high bounty griefer. Maybe there should be a limit on the number of shuns you can get per-day.